You might wonder why we haven’t had many blog updates for a while. It turns out that for me there tends to be a bit more motivation to post to the blog when we are in more socially isolated places. We also have more free time then.

As soon as we arrived at Marina Nayarit in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle along the northern side of Banderas Bay (Puerto Vallarta area), we were surrounded by people not just in marinas but in every anchorage. Going into La Cruz we knew that there were folks we’d met up north, including some of our Coho Ho Ho 2021 fleet friends, who were in the area. Our first night there we were already out drinking and dancing at the Tree House in La Cruz with our friends from S/V Sacagawea and a bunch of their sailing friends from Montana. Every night in La Cruz we were meeting new people and exchanging boat cards.

We stayed in Banderas Bay for a while doing touristy things and also taking advantage of marina time to clean up the boat some. We spent a few nights at Marina Vallarta in Puerto Vallarta proper as we had fond memories of staying at a hotel near there ten years ago. The area is still fun and it was great to be near Zaragoza marine and check out their store, but the marina itself was not great – only one tiny bathroom with two showers for each gender (and no changing space or towel/bag hooks) in a huge marina where it was about 3/4 mile walk to the shower from our slip. Plus dealing with check-in at the Puerto Vallarta port captain was very time consuming since they also handle lots of busy commercial and cruise ship traffic. But we did make the best of our time there and met up with more Coho Ho Ho people, finally meeting S/V Brightnest in person. The weekly markets at La Cruz marina on Sunday mornings and Marina Vallarta on Thursday night are definitley worth a visit but mostly have the same vendors at both. And we love eating at Mariscos 8 Tostadas at Marina Vallarta and have told all our PNW friends craving a source for great coffee beans to visit Tere & Pepe’s Coffee Shop which I discovered on my way to the great quality Lavanderia behind the Mega Soriana near Marina Vallarta.

When we left Marina Vallarta we were ready for some slower time alone but as we pulled into the Ipala anchorage south of Cabo Corrientes we were invited by our friends on S/V Oh Joy II to join them for dinner. They were heading north back to Banderas Bay to relax and start prepping for crossing to the Marquesas. We had some pretty slow time in Bahía Chacala next to the town of Pérula and we really wanted to start slowing down. We were already seeing much warmer temperatures in Banderas Bay and had some pretty hot days in Pérula too. We didn’t do much in Pérula other than walk the town and buy some produce and we didn’t even SUP or swim from the boat. We did spend time reading our books to learn more about anchorages to the south and thinking about our next steps.

With so many cruisers out there this season we weren’t able to visit some of the “hidden gem” small anchorages on our way south because other boats had already filled the limited space. So we ended up in Tenacatita with the huge fleet of boats anchored in the north end of the bay. If you want to know more about the social scene in Tenacatita, you should google Tenacatita and terms like “mayor” or “bocce ball.” Our friends on S/V Oh Joy II had already spent some time there and when we arrived we anchored out on the far end of the crowd closer to where our friends on S/V Infinite Grace, S/V Satori and S/V Brightnest already were. We also got to know S/V Aloha better in the bay and were lucky to have them around when our outboard failed (and they had a spare to kindly lend us). We did participate in the daily cruiser VHF nets on channel 17 and did really enjoy using our SUP and snorkeling in the bay and chatting with everyone on shore. I learned that the two kids I knew in high school who grew up on The Farm weren’t just known to the “Mayor of Tenacatita” but were in fact his sons and that the “Mayor” and his wife spend the summers in Modesto, CA. My hometown, where I am in fact sitting right now writing this post in my parents’ house less than a mile from the high school I went to with their sons.

Tenacatita was a lot of social and a lot of relaxing and learning. Pretty water with fish swarming around the boat each evening, a great place to get used to beach landing our dinghy, the convenience of being able to pay the local family to take us on their high-speed and sturdy panga across to La Manzanilla for the Friday morning market so we could re-provision, using the borrowed gas motor to go up the jungle river to the beach by the Aquarium and having our new friends on S/V Somehow help us by towing our dinghy the last half mile back to our boat because we didn’t bring extra gasoline. So many fun stories and memories.

When we left Tenacatita to head south we thought we’d be more on our own and to some extent we were more independent when we had our boat in the marina in Barra de Navidad, but we were surrounded by a lot of other sailboats with people we had met somewhere along the way. However, Barra de Navidad and neighboring Melaque are full of other gringos, especially retired Canadians who winter there. So we only ate out with other cruisers one night and while we did have some interactions here and there, we were mostly doing our own thing.

After Tenacatita we went down to the wonderful bay of Carrizal. That was a lot less social, but we did chat with our friends from S/V Somehow and S/V Aloha and even ran into S/V Alma Feroz again. At Carrizal, we decided to not head farther south to Santiago or Manzanillo and instead just went back up to anchor in the lagoon at Barra. We knew that the lagoon at Barra would be easy in terms of still getting daily visits from The French Baker and being able to hail the Taxi Aquatico to get into town. Barra had fewer wintering Canadians on our return (many we saw in restaurants were also talking about going home for the season) and it was a lot more chill. We provisioned way too much shrimp and headed back to Tenacatita.

In Tenacatita the community was already starting to thin out: they were having trouble getting volunteers to run the morning nets and many boats had already left for the season and many there were prepping to leave – some with a goal to get back to Banderas Bay for race week. We did do some socializing and took turns using the SUP to check out more corners of the bay. And we followed the crowd north to Chamela / Pérula to get ready for the weather window to head north around Cabo Corrientes.

In Chamela we liked listening to the boats we knew from Tenacatita hailing each other to plan sundowners and decide whether they wanted to go onshore for bocce or not. We also had the great luck that our friends from S/V Sacagawea showed up and invited us to go snorkeling at Isla Cocina using their big dinghy with a 20 hp motor (which can go much faster than our sailboats). That was so fun!

We finally made the overnight passage from Chamela, pulling up anchor at 10 PM to try to time the low-wind situation for rounding Cabo Corrientes. We had pretty light wind but lots of swell rolling us and Noj was not feeling well. For some reason, I was fine and was feeling well rested with the watch schedule. We anchored in the very crowded La Cruz anchorage and found quite a few more friends there and it wasn’t long before we were out on a Monday night drinking and dancing with S/V Que Vendra and S/V Azura Kai and some new friends. It would have been a Valle de Guadalupe wine tour reunion if S/V Fly Aweigh were there. We got into the marina and got to start using all the wonderful local services to clean, polish and wax the exterior of our boat while we did a much needed interior deep clean to prep to be away fro three weeks. I got to show off my pressure-cooker fessenjan to our friends from S/V Que Vendra who came in for dinner the night before my birthday and enjoyed browsing the La Cruz Sunday market on my birthday. Finally, S/V Fly Aweigh did show up the Monday before we flew back to the US and a large group of us including them, S/V Que Vendra, S/V Brightnest, and a boat we hadn’t met before had dinner out in La Cruz and wandered around lamenting that the churro vendor isn’t out on the street on Mondays.

So that was my crazy brain dump of all the socializing we’ve been doing since we got to Banderas Bay. I have been sharing photos of the sailing/snorkeling stuff to my Instagram @rohunter40 (if you try to follow me and I don’t know who you are from your profile and I don’t accept your request, just drop me a note to say who you are and why you want to follow me). Noj has been posting lots of text updates on our satellite PredictWind tracker (try the Where is Pasarada section on our blog and go to the tracker to see those: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Pasargada/). I will add a post here soon with lots of pictures for those of you who don’t use Instagram. Probably sometime in the next week before we fly back to PV and get ready to start sailing north to Sea of Cortez. In my opinion, the scattered-ness of this post is a pretty good representation of the chaos of the social scene for sailors in Banderas Bay and Costalegre. We expect things to be different as we scatter out more heading north, but we will see. Certainly we will have less reliable internet access up there so readers should expect infrequent big bursts of shared info instead of achorage-by-anchorage updates. However, we may try using the email-update option to post to this blog from our satellite internet. That would be no pictures, similar to our PredictWind tracker above that we post to over our slow satellite connection.